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The Exact Sense in Which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists

2008; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cul.0.0017

1460-2458

Robert Hullot-Kentor,

Italian Literature and Culture

The Exact Sense in Which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists Robert Hullot-Kentor (bio) Anyone who has been studying Adorno's philosophy over the past number of decades, perhaps including years overlapping with the philosopher's own life, may have noticed that despite the many new commentaries, despite the recently available publications of his correspondence and lecture courses, Adorno's writings are becoming increasingly obscure. This is not because Adorno is now more difficult to comprehend than he once was. On the contrary, the emerging obscurity of his philosophy is reciprocal with a newfound self-evidence in the writings. For this, the ready glosses and commentaries and years of growing familiarity are at least partly responsible, and we can start summing things up easily enough: Reification is the rigid web spun over the world, isolating the universal from the particular; dialectics rends that web, potentiating the conflict of the one and the many in which the primacy of the object is manifest; relations of production are this; forces of production that; the spell, the taboo, the fetish and barbarism, they are something else again. But the motive force of these concepts, their noeud vital, is gone. If, some decades ago, taking Negative Dialectics in hand, a reader was astounded at that title's daunting purport, now, in spite of himself, that same reader no longer distinctly sees how laying claim to the negative ever appeared to risk everything and confront all. Concepts that once spoke worlds for themselves, now stand mute in sight of the world. No doubt, one can put one's shoulder to the historical weight that is heavily ballasted in the flywheel of any one of them and, shoving, bring that concept around once, but "subjectivity," for instance, will not on its own bring itself around again. "Agency," not "subjectivity," is now the self-revolving topic. Plainly, it is not a matter of our individual volition which ideas are bindingly thinkable and which are not. But if it is not for us to decide, [End Page 137] as an act of will or logical acuity, which concepts draw the world into themselves as into a vortex and which suddenly eddy back out again, slackly dispersing their phenomena, we can sometimes understand aspects of the moment in which this reversal occurs. Comprehending something of this event will figure in this discussion, but only by way of posing the overarching question of how the central concepts of Adorno's thinking have lost their grip on the historical moment. And, while, as is to be seen, it is possible to discern what was once their noeud vital and state it, doing so will not reanimate the philosophy. On the contrary, it will reveal an almost intolerable point of dispute between the standpoint of thought today and the content of Adorno's philosophy, even while we recognize that this philosophy itself is of increasingly urgent interest and importance. Boomtown Revenant The culture industry is one of Adorno's concepts whose ghost for certain is gone. But it is also the concept whose paradoxical existence, when examined, provides unrivaled insight into the contemporary fate of the whole of his work. The potentially illuminating paradox is this: While the idea of the culture industry shares in the evident exhaustion of Adorno's central concepts; while there is no doubt that its ghost is gone; this concept all the same lives a vigorous afterlife, fully indifferent to the fact of its decease long ago. Unlike any other concept in the whole of Adorno's oeuvre, the term culture industry is quoted omni-presently in the full-throated convictions of our age. If, today, anyone who intends to be alert, word by word, to the difference between what bears speaking about and what does not, would hesitate to draw a fresh breath to launch into a critique, for instance, of the depredations of reification, no one hesitates to hold forth ad libitum on the culture industry. This could be documented by presenting the statistical frequency of the term's citation in scholarly journals and even in the newspapers of major cities. But the ambitious tenacity of this concept's grip on existence is better...